Our Corporate Culture Should Support Failure
Thursday, October 30th, 2008
Organisations have historically supported success and frowned on, even punished, failure. The industrial society we live in had, for a long time, the notion that good ideas work and make money and bad ideas don’t work and the organisation loses money. We pretty much all know that’s bollocks – or do we? How many work environments have you experienced where your ideas were greeted with hostility or you tried something way out on a limb and then got chewed out in the manager’s office for wasting time or effort?
The management threat to bring this failure up on your next performance review, which in turn may affect your promotion opportunities, is a prohibitive barrier to capturing innovation (I have a secret wish to write a dissertation – or even eventually a PhD thesis – based on the pros and cons of performance reviews). Still, this managerial negativity is more common than you would expect. We need to applaud failure, not write it down as evidence or abuse it through petty comments in often maligned and over-personalised performance reviews.
The Story of 3M
One company that comes to mind for learning this lesson early and later prospering is 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing). As I recall, and you can correct me, 3M started out as a group of relatively young people who put everything into the business and started mining. Those were the mining and manufacturing boom times in the early 20th Century. They didn’t do so well, in fact mining worthless anorthosite. But they picked themselves up again, brushed off the dust and are now one of the most successful innovators in the world today. What happened in between mining anorthosite and the current 3M?
